The pencil fell

Picked up a small stack of old Films and Filming magazines in a Stockbridge charity shop: £1 each, the best price I’ve ever seen. I nearly bought all of them, but sense prevailed and I restricted myself to issues with interesting interviews or Raymond Durgnat articles.

Here’s Francis Ford Coppola interviewed in 1969, talking about his writing gig on Rene Clement’s IS PARIS BURNING? (the interview is a fantastic guide to FCC’s screenwriting years):

“After all the scripts I had written for Seven Arts (11 in 2 years), I was promised a reward of sorts–Ray Stark said I could just go to Paris and have a vacation with my wife because the writer then working on it was a man who was very ill, dying in fact. And these are the honest-to-God words used, my job was to assist that man and ‘if the pencil fell out of his hand, I was to pick it up.'”

I totally believe Ray Stark would have said that.

On the other hand, who was this dying writer? None of the credited or uncredited scribes listed on the IMDb expired within ten years of the film’s production. Which suggests that not only did they speak callously of the guy, they punted his name into obscurity as soon as he’d pegged it.

Coppola continues to trash-talk his collaborators:

“I could write a book about the troubles we had [I wish he would]– the silly, petty, dumb things with the French Government; it was just an insane mess. Paul Graetz, the French producer, was no help. And Rene Clement, the director, was even worse. Nobody would speak up. They were all terrified. They just wouldn’t admit that there were any Communists in France during the war. Or if there were we were never to use their names. It came down to that. Why? Because the de Gaulle regime didn’t acknowledge their existence–then or now. You see, the whole essence of the plot, as I saw it, was the battle between the Communists and the de Gaullist fraction [sic] for control of the city when the Germans moved out. You see, whereas the de Gaullists wanted to stall an uprising because they wanted the Americans to come in so that they, the de Gaullists, could eventually take over, the Communists wanted to start an insurrection so that they could take immediate control. That was the story. And if we couldn’t have that, I couldn’t see where there was a movie to be made. Well, I wanted out. I wanted to go home. Then Seven Arts sent Gore Vidal to Paris, who persuaded me to try things with him for a time.”

I left the “fraction” thing in, because FCC has an occasional tendency to mangle the language (“I don’t make films for the hoi polloi,” Clive James quoted him as saying, when he meant “the intelligentsia”).

It was lucky for Coppola that he stayed on the project long enough to scoop up co-writing credit with Vidal, because the gig established him as a WWII expert and that got him PATTON, which won him a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar. (General Patton even appears in IPB?, forcefully personated by Kirk Douglas.)

All that FCC says is interesting — and I can well imagine it being true. I do wonder how much of the production difficulties he was party to and understood, as a non-French speaker. But surely the stuff about avoiding mention of communism is true. As luck would have it, I just rewatched the movie, a favourite of mine (and Spike Lee’s).

It turns out there WAS a movie to be made. The ideological question of who was to conquer Paris is replaced in the film by a patriotic one — can the first tanks in be Leclerc’s French ones? Can the Resistance take the city before the Germans withdraw? And, most urgently of all, will the departing Germans blow up every single cultural treasure in the city? And, a side-issue of nevertheless pressing import, who will survive?

Clement may have been, in Coppola’s estimation, hopeless at negotiating the political perils of the production, but he serves up a large-scale historical epic in multiple languages (I do need to find a version that preserves the English AND French-language performances — do I need to edit one myself?) and the movie is surprisingly light on its feet — no white elephant (although Manny Farber and I would disagree on that, I’m sure). And it may be Maurice Jarre’s second-best score after LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (and the best he actually did himself — LOA seemingly owes a lot to the orchestrator). I do find the GREAT ESCAPE tradition of adding jaunty marches to grim war tales rather sinister, but it WORKS — the counterpoint is both shrewdly commercial, lightening the gloom, and artistically attractive… if morally queasy. Jarre brings out his cheery tune each time a new French movie star strides into frame, which means the music gets a VERY frequent airing — look, it’s Jean-Paul Belmondo, Charles Boyer, Alain Delon, Jean-Pierre Cassell, Leslie Caron, Bruno Cremer, Claude Dauphin, Daniel Gelin, Yves Montand, Michel Piccoli, Simone Signoret, Jean-Louis Trintignant… the individual casting is shrewd, too, with Trintignant as traitor in tinted shades… Piccoli’s existential jazz-beard marks him as a commie even if the script dares not speak the name.

As William Goldman explained of A BRIDGE TOO FAR, all-star casting is useful not only to pre-sell a movie, but it makes it much easier for the audience to keep the story straight in a complex film with countless speaking parts — we already know everybody so we can follow along happily.

IS PARIS BURNING? stars Ferdinand Griffon dit Pierrot; Adam Belinksi; Gigi; King Louis XIII; Bernardo; Victor Manzon ‘Serrano’; President of Earth; Jef Costello; Spartacus; Cagliostro; Pa Kent; Auric Goldfinger; Louis Bernard; Von Luger ‘The Kommandant’; Cesar Soubeyran dit ‘Le Papet’; Norman Bates; Henri Husson; Dr. Mabuse; Claude Ridder; Mare ‘Casque D’Or’; Elliot Ness; Clerici; Nscho-tschi; Milkman; Slugworth; Kazanian; Julien Doinel – le beau-père d’Antoine; Scope; and Charles Foster Kane.

Dead Queen Walking

I power-walked to the St Columbo’s Bookshop today as part of my exercise regime and picked up a pristine copy of Raymond Durgnat’s A Mirror for England which, despite an inadequate index which omits half the films cited, promises to be an excellent pointer to British obscurities for me to investigate. Then I got the call that I could drop off some discs with my editor’s missus for our next project. I was closer than I otherwise would have been to the drop-off, but not close enough so I bounded on a bus.

Unfortunately, the Queen is dead. I so far have had no particular reaction to this, but it turns out her body is at Holyrood, and will then be exhibited for her more necrophile supporters in St Giles Cathedral. While the royal cadaver is in town, the buses are all diverted. I have no idea why, but it did give me a chance to have an emotional reaction to the monarch’s demise — one of irritated frustration as my chosen bus veered off into the hinterlands.

More power-walking as I hiked across town to get to my rendezvous — made it more or less precisely on time. Then hopped on a bus which, instead of taking me directly home as planned, headed off into the back of beyond back the way I’d come. Sheesh.

Meanwhile, here’s another Emil Cohl film… but WHICH? It is NOT, as lableled, LES AVENTURES DU BARON DU CRAC (1910) — and even that film is actually 1911, per IMDb (but who knows?). I have seen LADBDC, courtesy of the box set Gaumont Treasures 2. This is not it. I don’t have Gaumont Treasures 2 to hand so I can’t see if this one is there under a different title.

Page Seventeen II: The Second Story

As usual, seven passages from seven page seventeens. I’ve recently enjoyed the rather mysterious short stories of Walter De La Mare. It was particularly fun to read Missing, a story narrated in a tea shop in a heatwave, while being in a cafe in a heat wave. So when I picked up WDLM’s novel of possession/reincarnation The Return from the St Columba’s Bookstore, I turned eagerly to page seventeen to see if it would offer me a suitable extract.

To my surprise I found a previous reader had bookmarked the spot with a scrap of paper. One the paper were the haunting words S.W. BRITISH CHAIN FREQUENCY GROUP 1B. Printed in green ink that closely matched the green hue of the Pan Books paperback itself. On the inside front cover the book was stamped WARDROOM LIBRARY H.M.S. SEAHAWK, and since S.W. can stand for shortwave, it seemed possible that this little piece of paper dated from the book’s use as light reading at sea.

On page seventeen I encountered a character called Sheila, which is my mother’s name. Here’s the passage I’ve selected, along with six more from six different volumes.

Lawford shut his mouth. “I suppose so–a fit,” he said presently. “My heart went a little queer, and I sat down and fell into a kind of doze–a stupor, I suppose. I don’t remember anything more. And then I woke; like this.”

I recall the scent of some kind of toilet powder–I believe she stole it from her mother’s Spanish maid–a sweetish, lowly, musky perfume. It mingles with her own biscuity odour, and my senses were suddenly filled to the brim; a sudden commotion in a nearby bush prevented them from overflowing–and as we drew away from each other, and with aching veins attended to what was probably a howling cat, there came from the house her mother’s voice calling her, with a rising frantic note–and Dr. Cooper ponderously limped out into the garden. But that mimosa grove–the tingle, the flame, the honeydew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since–until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.

Mr. Hutton was aware that he had not behaved with proper patience; but he could not help it. Very early in his manhood he had discovered that not only did he not feel sympathy for the poor, the weak, the diseased, and deformed; he actually hated them. Once, as an undergraduate, he had spent three days at a mission in the East End. He had returned, filled with a profound and ineradicable disgust. Instead of pitying, he loathed the unfortunate. It was not, he knew, a very comely emotion, and he had been ashamed of it at first. In the end he had decided that it was temperamental, inevitable, and had felt no further qualms. Emily had been healthy and beautiful when he married her. He had loved her then. But now – was it his fault that she was like this?

To kill or not to kill an insect is a decision which faces several characters. It is morally all the more indicative as the act involves no retaliatory consequence, because it is a matter of impulse rather than reflection, wile from conventional viewpoints it has no moral significance. Thus the insect motif sometimes suggests a reverence for life. But this reverence is amused and sardonic, and has its markedly un-Schweitzerian aspects. The sudden death of an insect can also imply that a man can died a abruptly, and as unimportantly.

In the folklore of the doppelganger (German for double-goer; defined by the OED as “wraith of a living person”) to meet your duplicate is a premonition of death. Sellers, who had visited Roger Moore on the set of The Man Who Haunted Himself, must have felt as if he’d toppled headlong into a similarly horrific plot. As The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu, on Sellers’ orders, was being re-re-re-written throughout the night, by teams of hacks, belletrists, ex-playwrights, and just about anybody who could stay awake and hold a pen, this was exactly an element which was worked in at the last moment (though it was lost again when the film was edited after Sellers’ passing). As Sellers intended it (and he through the leaves of the script other people had concocted to the ground, in order to improvise it), the rejuvenated Fu, and Taylor as Nayland, were to walk off into the sunset together, the opposites reconciled, the doubles united. ‘You are the only worthy adversary I ever had, Nayland. They were the good old days. We can recapture them and start all over again.’

‘I admit I can’t make him out,’ resumed Barker, abstractedly; ‘he never opens his mouth without saying something so indescribably half-witted that to call him a fool seems the very feeblest attempt at characterisation. But there’s another thing about him that’s quite funny. Do you know that he has the one collection of Japanese lacquer in Europe? Have you ever seen his books? All Greek poets and medieval French and that sort of thing. Have you ever been in his rooms? It’s like being inside an amethyst. And he moves about in all that and talks like – like a turnip.’

Suddenly I found myself lying awake, peering from my sandy mattress through the door of the tent. I looked at my watch pinned to the canvas, and saw by the bright moonlight that it was past twelve o’clock–the threshold of a new day–and I had therefore slept a few hours. The Swede was asleep still beside me; the wind howled as before; something plucked at my heart and made me feel afraid. There was a sense of disturbance in my immediate neighbourhood.

Postscript: Fiona is now reading The Return, and in conversation with friend and Shadowplayer David Melville Wingrove she has learned that it was HE who originally donated it to the charity shop where I found it…

The Return by Walter De La Mare; Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov; The Gioconda Smile, from Mortal Coils by Aldous Huxley; Luis Bunuel by Raymond Durgnat; The Life and Death of Peter Sellers by Roger Lewis; The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesterton; The Willows, from Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood.